The responsiveness of long-term household debt to the interest rate is a crucial parameter for assessing the effectiveness of public policies aimed at promoting specific types of saving. This paper estimates the effect of a reform of Credito Bonificado, a large program in Portugal that...

Estimating the impact of bank mergers on credit granted and on interest rates requires a framework that allows to disentangle the effect of changes in market structure generated by mergers from the effects arising from changes in banks’ operating environment. However, most of the literature on...

This paper assesses the existence of persistent seasonal effects in the daily returns of the Portuguese stock market. We use daily data on the stock market index to study long-lasting differences in returns across the days of the week, within months and around holidays. For the period 1988-2001,...